Monday, March 18, 2024

Project Day: Studio Shop Overhaul

I'm charging through my 2024 side-project plans like randy sailor on shore leave. My latest project completion is the overhaul of the Maitz & Wurts Studio Shop.

The old Studio Shop was running on Zen Cart, THE open source shop software of choice in... 2011. When I originally signed on as webmaster during the pandemic, the Studio Shop was one of the pieces where I knew right away, "If I touch that before I understand it, it'll disintegrate before my eyes." I added a little duct tape in October 2020 -- making the pages actually resize on cell phones and adding catalog pages in front to guide people to the artwork they desired. After that, the pandemic kept going and going and I lost focus on projects for quite a while.

The bulk of the actual rework took place in February 2024. I downloaded and customized the open source platform, OpenCart, held my nose while engaging with the prickly developer community, and got a working demo site together pretty easily. I then used Kotlin to write a repeatable import/export process that grabbed the inventory of art prints (over 200) from the old shop and loaded them into the new shop.

The trickiest part of the project is that the owners are actually artists who care about the visual presentation of their works -- the site is less a commercial store and more of an online version of a studio you might walk through at the Torpedo Factory or other hippie institute. So the out-of-the-box style of OpenCart might be great for selling phones, but doesn't lend itself well to the appreciation of art.

We went live successfully early on Friday morning. Now that I've wrapped this up, I'm thinking about moving my makeover of the URI! Zone up in the queue and tackling that this summer!

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Friday, March 15, 2024

Review Day: Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There are no major spoilers in this review.

Children of Memory is the final book in the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky (although the author might revisit this world if ideas lead him there in the future). The book works very well as a capstone on the series, taking the ideas from the earlier books and then stretching, weaving, and elevating them to logical conclusions.

The story begins in a familiar way, with the convergence across time and space of ancient human terraformers seeking to build a new Earth and the modern, uplifted species traveling across the galaxy in search of life. This recognizable setting effectively toys with your expectations while the author gradually introduces discrepancies which suggest that things are not as they seem and, in fact, something may have gone horribly wrong.

The tone and style of writing are different than before. It's a mix of innocence, sardonic wit, and wry pessimism that often feels more like a fantastic fairy tale (with a little Douglas Adams thrown in) than a sci-fi novel about evolution and intelligence. Reading still requires exacting attention though -- because one of the major themes is what constitutes identity and "self-hood", there are passages that are almost infinitely recursive in the way that they present big ideas and bounce those ideas across characters with different origins, and within physical or virtual spaces. I found the exploration of themes to be very successful, and if the language had been any less dense, it would have made the arguments on the page more shallow and less thought-provoking.

I felt like the concepts overwhelmed the plot in the second book, Children of Ruin, so I was very happy to see this book end on a strong, emotional note. The penultimate reveal of the story's mysteries truly moved me in a way that nothing earlier in the series had done. The subsequent finale hit just the right mix of maudlin and hopeful and felt like "the only way" it could have ended. Most impressive to me is that the author was able to draw these emotions out of me using characters outside of a human frame of reference. To oversimplify: Adrian Tchaikovsky was able to introduce me to a single-celled organism and then, hundreds of pages and generations later, convince me to care about its feelings -- masterful!

Final Grade: A

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12 pictures of your day on the 12th of every month

5:28 AM: Early morning Beat Saber workout.
6:13 AM: Showered and ready for the day.
6:37 AM: Bagel for breakfast.
7:00 AM: Getting shoes on to go to the bus stop.
7:49 AM: Arriving at the old Tysons office for work.
12:57 PM: Home, and hearing voices outside my home office window.
3:57 PM: Rookie positioning during car washing.
4:19 PM: Inspecting my latest Eagle project: preventing all of my purchased woodchips from washing out of the common area and onto the sidewalk.
4:32 PM: Breezy enough for cheap kites.
5:22 PM: Reading Maia's scrolls about Pokemon.
5:46 PM: Chicken cordon bleu for dinner.
8:08 PM: Time for taxes.

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Monday, March 11, 2024

Easy Photos Day

Guys on the Silver Line, heading to Ballston and back.


Ian mixes and matches some vehicles.


Maia goes to the Baltimore Aquarium with the grandparents.


Maia's new bud, Dolphinita.


New playground in Alexandria #5 of 7000.

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Friday, March 08, 2024

Review Day: A Lion's Pride by P.L. Stuart

There are no major spoilers in this review.

A Lion's Pride is the fourth book in The Drowned Kingdom saga by P.L. Stuart. I absolutely love where the story takes us in this book, the midpoint of the series. However, I found myself frustrated by aspects of the writing that stalled the momentum.

King Othrun of Eastrealm seems to have attained a period of stability for his fledgling kingdom. He has acquired considerable political capital from his past strategies and hard-earned reputation as a warlord, but still can't always resist the urge to step straight into trouble (especially when it involves a pretty face). Othrun's growth as a character continues to be a compelling thread -- he faces hard truths about his destiny to spread the faith of the Single God in spite of the incongruous mysticism he has experienced during his time in Eltnia.

The previous book, Lord and King, acts as a fulcrum point and springboard, allowing the first part of Book 4 to fly out of the gate with wonderfully intense showdowns, unexpected reveals, and a deepening of the interesting lore around the witches and druids. There is a fair amount of repetition in this first part, but I appreciated that these asides jogged my memory about far-flung events from earlier books.

The second part of Book 4 is where the pacing stumbled for me. There's an overwhelming amount of introspection and recapping -- the constant reminders about who the characters are and how Othrun feels about them arrests the forward motion of the plot and left me feeling like one of Othrun's warhorses moving timidly across muddy terrain. I felt like I was sitting in on a D&D session where every player was constantly reciting the top traits from their character sheets before taking an action.

I generally enjoy reading from Othrun's perspective and hearing his inner monologues but I felt that there was just too much introspection that didn't provide any deeper knowledge than I already had. If Othrun's opinions of characters had changed over time or (even better), if Othrun's opinions changed the way I felt about the characters, the amount of introspection might have been more successful. And that definitely happens in a few key scenes! Outside of those rare examples, though, I felt like the supporting characters had become a little flatter from over-repeating their most well-known qualities.

The ending is satisfying: exciting, triumphant, and tragic all at once. The final scene involving menacing alliances in the north definitely gave me "big screen adaptation" vibes and I'm still very excited to see where the story goes in the next release, A Pack of Wolves.

Final Grade: B-

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